The Chisana Story

[Steve Herschbach]

My super dredge location reached with great effort was proving to be not much better than the previous site. The gold was almost all reconcentrated tailing material and so there were no large nuggets. I worked a few days, and after initially trying to go deep found I did better working the shallower material. Even then the compacted material and larger rocks made it slow going. I got a couple days with 11 pennyweight each, but not the ounce a day stuff I had been hoping for.

A cleanup - about 1/4 ounce of gold

I pulled the dredge right up into the boulder pile at the base of the pool below the notch hoping for larger gold.

Dredge located right below notch

This location proved to be no better. I resolved to hike the dredge back up the creek to a shallow bedrock location I eyeballed hiking down the creek each day.

New dredge location

Bedrock exposed in bottom of hole

The weather turned cold and rainy, and my new dredge location was just "ok" with a long cold day recovering 6.4 pennyweight (20 pennyweight per Troy ounce). Between the cold weather, long hike to work site, and only ok gold, I decided to pack it in as far as dredging and get in a couple days detecting before we ran out of time. I found about one-quarter ounce of small nuggets detecting with three at about a gram. Large nuggets were eluding me this trip, with the largest at about 1.5 pennyweight found while dredging.

My life was going through massive changes at this time. My partner and I were selling our business to the employees and retiring after 35 years. My business partner pulled out first and moved to Florida. I hung around a couple years to help transition the business, but was now in the process of moving to Nevada myself. While this was a good trip with pretty good gold found it was below my expectations. That combined with everything else going on in my life made me decide to sell out my share of the claims after this trip.

Here is my gold for this trip...

0.6 ounces Steve found metal detecting

And another 3.25 ounces found gold dredging

All in all it was an interesting trip, maybe a little less fun and a little more work than some others. Definitely colder than most! As we packed up and headed out I thought that this would be my last visit to Gold Hill as I began my new life in Nevada and places far from Alaska and Chisana. Never say never though because it turned out later I would have another chance at visiting Gold Hill and Bonanza Creek.

To be continued....

[jrbeatty]

29 minutes ago, Steve Herschbach said:

My super dredge location reached with great effort was proving to be not much better than the previous site

Dontcha hate it when well thought out theory fails to produce? - - happens a lot in this game.

For me, part of the fun of it.

[Steve Herschbach]

This last winter I had the opportunity to visit with my business partner of many years. In the course of the visit he mentioned that he had not been up to Chisana in several years and was planning a visit over the summer. He wanted to know if I was interested in visiting again. Now, it can be seen above that the last few times I visited the mine I concentrated on gold dredging and validity exam work. I had not visited the mine since 2012 and in the meantime new technology landed on my doorstep - the Minelab GPZ 7000. I figured that alone made a return visit worth a go but I was mainly just pleased to be able to see one of my favorite places in Alaska one more time.

This time I was more cognizant of the fact I might not see the place again, and so I went to extra effort to take more photos than usual this trip. So here we go with this last deluxe entry in this long tale!

We wanted to spend a decent amount of time at the mine. The plan was for three of us to go in - mine partners Dudley and George plus me as a guest - and spend almost three weeks on the hill. Normally I love the drive to Alaska, but I usually take four days each way. I had a busy year planned already and I was really not wanting to lose over a week just to driving my truck. It was decided Dudley and George would fly in to the mine first. I flew up from Reno to Anchorage and hung out with my family waiting for a satellite phone call from the mine. They would check everything out and let me know what last second supplies might be needed.

That is exactly what happened. I got a call from Dudley with a shopping list. I spent half a day rounding up the odds and ends and after one more night at my sister's place, headed out bright and early for Nabesna in a borrowed vehicle. My goal was to get to Devil's Mountain Lodge before 10am to meet the boys leaving the mine. One group of owners and guests was already up at the mine before us, and we were basically switching places with them. They were flying out, and I would be flying in the same day. It is best to fly as early as possible to take advantage of cooler and calmer air in the morning.

The drive to Devil's Mountain Lodge is about 300 miles or around six hours drive. The last part is halfway maintained dirt road from the highway to the lodge which is subject to numerous washouts during rainy periods. It is a nice drive through the upper Matanuska River Valley with great scenery along the way. The Matanuska Glacier, Chugach Mountains, Sheep Mountain, and Wrangell Mountains all afford some excellent photo opportunities. 

View of Chugach Mountains from upper Matanuska Valley; Long Lake on right

Chugach Mountains and Matanuska River

Matanuska Glacier

Sheep Mountain copper and gypsum deposits

12,000 foot stratovolcano Mt. Drum in the Wrangell Mountains

Craggy mountain along Nabesna Road

I got to Devil's Mountain Lodge under sunny skies just after the last guys arrived coming out from the mine. They had a successful trip and were quite pumped up about it. Since these guys were the only ones into the mine the last few summers I asked them that all important question "has anyone run a GPZ up on the hill?" The answer to my relief was no. Time was wasting and with that I loaded up my gear into the fabulous Hulk for my flight into the mine.

The "Hulk" at Devil's Mountain Lodge airstrip

To be continued....

[Jackpine]

Great photos Steve and thanks.

My Aunt and Uncle were chosen as participants in the Matanuska Valley Colony experiment.  My dad who was single at the time followed later by riding the rails to Seattle and taking the boat to Anchorage.  When the War broke out he went to Seattle to enlist, returning back home to Michigan when the War in the Pacific ended.

I heard many stories about the Matanuska valley area growing up as a child and have always wished I could have experienced it during that time.  Definitely need to put getting up there on the bucket list.

 

[Steve Herschbach]

There are just a few aerial photos of what a person sees from the air flying in and out of Chisana. The next photo is immediately after takeoff from the Devil's Mountain Lodge airstrip. The mountain you see behind the lodge is actually White Mountain - Devil's Mountain is seen from the lodge and is not visible in this photo.

Nestled under the left side / end of White Mountain is the Nabesna Mine. This hardrock mine produced over 50,000 ounces of gold in the 1930's.

White Mountain and Devil's Mountain Lodge at Nabesna, Alaska

View from the backseat of the "Hulk"

Floodplain of the glacial fed Nabesna River (glacier in distance)

Typical mountain scenery

Massive outwash floodplain from Chisana Glacier / Chisana River

Chisana Glacier

The Chisana River starts at Chisana Glacier and initially flows through the wide open valley where the town of Chisana is situated. The river is geologically older than the nearby Nutzotin Mountains. As the mountains built up over time the river maintained a channel that now appears to cut right through the Nutzotin Mountains. The river is actually flowing north until it eventually meets the Nabesna River and they both become the Tanana River. If we followed this river about 300 miles it would bring us to Fairbanks, Alaska. The Tanana River eventually meets the Yukon, and about 600 miles from this photo eventually flows into the Bering Sea.

Chisana River where it flows through Nutzotin Mountains

Finally we arrive at Gold Hill. There is another gold bearing stream called Big Eldorado Creek over the hill from us - this is an aerial view of Big Eldorado Creek. There is a gold source at Big Eldorado Creek that is situated in massive pyrite and so the gold there is of local source, bright and shiny. Only a few thousand feet of Big El were ever mined. I hiked over there years ago and still have a fist-sized chunk of pyrite from the location.

Big Eldorado Creek flowing off Gold Hill

The turning approach is made into the mountainside airstrip. The Hulk landing uphill comes to an almost immediate stop, and so even though this is a very short airstrip less than half gets used while landing. When departing the plane is often empty and can take off in just a couple hundred feet.

The Hulk parked on Gold Hill

To be continued....

[Jim_Alaska]

Your pictures are making me homesick Steve. But don't stop, this has been a great story. I just posted a link to it on my forums, so you should have more folks reading your story. 

[jrbeatty]

2 hours ago, Jim_Alaska said:

Your pictures are making me homesick Steve

Breathtakingly spectacular country of origin Jim, Love to see it one day. Would be best prospected by younger legs than mine though

Steve - -  waiting impatiently - -

[Bob(AK)]

Love the Hulk Steve. What is the elevation of the strip?

[Jim_Alaska]

10 hours ago, jrbeatty said:

Breathtakingly spectacular country of origin Jim, Love to see it one day. Would be best prospected by younger legs than mine though

Steve - -  waiting impatiently - -

I know what you mean JR. My legs have given out also. Mine is not just from age, but also have developed Neuropathy, which means I have no feeling in my legs and feet. It makes you extremely unsteady, which makes it dangerous on uneven ground.

[Steve Herschbach]

10 hours ago, Bob(AK) said:

Love the Hulk Steve. What is the elevation of the strip?

Just shy of 5000 feet.

 

I was determined this trip to concentrate on just enjoying myself and having a good time. Anyone who followed this forum this spring knows I was burning the candle at both ends doing website upgrades. Nobody knew at the time but I was on fire trying to get that all done before this trip. The effort had me a little burned out but that is ok because this trip was a reward for all that effort.

That being the case job one for me was just to decompress and relax. I wanted to be sure and hike around to get lots of photos. In particular I wanted to get a good photo of a ptarmigan and a ground squirrel. I had no plans to do anything but metal detect for gold (no dredging), and had both my Minelab GPZ 7000 and Equinox 800 along.

The ground as anyone following this thread knows has been heavily metal detected in the past. I knew there was plenty of tiny gold to find and figured I would do well with the Equinox 800 and new 6" coil. And in fact on my day of arrival I did a little detecting at the end of the day and got six little nuggets totaling 0.5 gram - gold on the first evening!

Steve happy to be back up on Gold Hill - July 2018

The next day I grabbed the GPZ 7000 and headed for a once reliable location in the bench area. There is decomposed basalt bedrock that looks more like sand than bedrock that held a lot of nuggets. Everyone and their brother had been over this patch with many detectors including the GPX 5000. If there was a place that might show what the GPZ was capable of on this ground that spot was it.

The ground is fairly mild and I was able to use Steve's Insanely Hot Settings. These settings are basically just every control on the GPZ maxed out to be as sensitive as possible. In lots of places the mineralization will not allow the GPZ to be run this hot and the settings make hot rocks if present really sing out. Yet I find I run these settings almost everyplace I go in Nevada and California because they do work to find gold for me.

I fired up the GPZ, got tuned up, made a couple passes over the ground with the coil - nice sweet signal! Not more than a few minutes detecting with the GPZ and a nice 2.1 gram nugget popped out of the ground. And the best part - it was not a whisper signal. The GPZ lit this nugget right up and all the sudden I had a real good feeling about how this was going to work out.

First GPZ nugget ever found on Gold Hill - 2.1 grams

I did not see any point in looking for the tiniest gold with the GPZ 7000. I know this ground like the back of my hand, and where most all the gold had been found over decades of time. That made it very easy for me to target locations where I knew there was gold in the past, but where there might be more nuggets lurking in deeper ground. Deeper could mean more gravel depth, or maybe just deeper pockets of crevices in bedrock. There is also a lot of low lying alpine bushes and other ground cover that work to keep a coil away from the gold. With a VLF I might try and work under this stuff pushing it aside bit by bit. The GPZ has so much excess power I just ran the coil over the stuff while pushing it down.

My first day detecting did not find a lot of nuggets but they were all fat ones that added up.... seven nuggets for 7.1 grams plus a little copper nugget.

Steve's first GPZ nuggets from Bonanza Creek

George goes detecting with Minelab SDC 2300

George and I were there to relax and metal detect. Dudley on the other hand has always found metal detecting boring and so he was gung-ho to go dredging. Years of validity exam work and piles of paperwork finally resulted in all the remaining claims being fully permitted. This meant that Little Eldorado now had permits for suction dredging which previously had only applied to Bonanza Creek. Dudley was convinced, just like I had been previously, that ounce a day dredging awaited if he could find the right spot.

Dudley working 4" Keene dredge on Little Eldorado Creek

And like I said, I was on the lookout for photo opportunities. Here is another Arctic Ground Squirrel photo and a view of the Wrangell Mountains looking down Bonanza Creek.

"Parka Squirrel" watching from rock wall

View of Wrangell Mountains from Bonanza Creek

To be continued....